Leo Marx

SOURCE: "The Machine in the Garden," in The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 113-26.

In the following essay, originally published in 1956 in The New England Quarterly, Marx examines the themes and images employed by American authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville to indirectly respond to industrialization during the years before 1860. Marx also studies the influence of the Industrial Revolution on the literature of the time.

. . . the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson1

I

The response of American writers to industrialism has been a typical and, in many respects, a distinguishing feature of our culture. The Industrial Revolution, of course, was international, but certain aspects of the process were intensified in this country. Here, for...